iPhone

iPad

iOS

Jailbreak

Cydia

EDIT: Another little copy pasted popped up a couple days later called hClipboard. Using Both Clippy and hClipboard together is the way to go .

What is the #1 most important basic feature that the iPhone has been lacking since day one? Copy & Paste. Yes it is more important than MMS; everyone would benefit from some nice copy/paste action (which is standard on nearly every other smartphone on the market). As of just a couple short hours ago the dream has come one step closer to reality with a Cydia app named Clippy.

Clippy is a new native app (not a web app) that allows you to copy paste between the stock iPhone applications like Mail, Safari, Notes, etc. While it doesn't work with some AppStore apps (it does however work in twitterverse & ireal) and you can only copy paste when you are editing txt it is a good step in the right direction.

To use you first need to be in the txt editor mode on the iPhone. In this case we're replying to an email. First drag the cursor over the text you want to copy, press the ".?123" button and select copy. Next move to whatever other app you'd like where you can edit text, press the ".?123" button again, and select paste.

Unfortunately you must have have the keyboard up to be able to copy/paste. This means if you want to copy from an email you received into a txt message you first have to hit reply to the email so you get a text editor so you can copy. I can come up with other examples but you get the idea. You also no can no longer drag the cursor between words/letters in text because now it just highlights for copy. Clippy also doesn't seem to be working for many third-party apps yet -- hit-n-miss for which apps it will work with.

Even though Clippy needs to be developed further to be more feature-rich and better integrated it does something that nothing else has (not counting web apps) so far by allowing you to copy paste between Apple applications on the iPhone. This is the closest anyone has come with the most potential to be improved into a viable copy/paste solution.

Great work so far by app dev Ryan Petrich! We look forward to improvements in the future!

Clippy is available via Cydia. Just refresh and search for "clippy."Yup Cydia. Apple's limitations don't allow this sort of thing on the AppStore.